The 25 greatest cooking songs, according to Anthony Bourdain
“You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese.” – Anthony Bourdain (1956 – 2018)
Cooking can be a healer. It might feel like a chore to some, but for others, myself included, the chance to follow a recipe or simply your intuition and create a meal that will bring enjoyment to you, family and friends is an opportunity I am willing to grab any chance.
The wholesome activity is not just a place for mental rehabilitation but for moral expounding and a chance to clear the fogginess of the day away. It’s a message first shared to me by my grandmother, then compounded by the smiles of friends and defined by the legendary Anthony Bourdain.
Bourdain’s love of food was sometimes a little tainted by his time in the working kitchen of New York, but the communal celebration of a meal was something we could all enjoy daily. It, like music, is perhaps one of our most easily accessible spiritual experiences. It’s a mantra Bourdain rightly shared whenever he could. It makes it the perfect time to revisit the man’s two greatest passions: food and music. The chef has always been a part of the bustling alternative scenes of each field and is a legend that is still very sorely missed to this day.
Bourdain was a figure synonymous with non-conformity, carving his own path despite any obstacles in his way. From his forward-thinking approach to food and his deep affinity for dive bars and their colourful characters to his love of punk rock, Bourdain embodied the spirit of anti-establishment rebellion. He strived to merge his passions seamlessly, and this playlist of the greatest songs to cook to offers a raw, unfiltered glimpse into that pure, unadulterated connection he so cherished.
As he extolled himself, “I’ve long believed that good food, good eating, is all about risk. Whether we’re talking about unpasteurized Stilton, raw oysters or working for organised crime ‘associates,’ food, for me, has always been an adventure.” That’s a punk enough outlook in itself.
The chef was a well-known champion of New York’s punk movement, and, somewhat coincidentally, Bourdain was also at the forefront of the food scene as it began to bubble away in the cauldron of NYC’s backstreets. It was a marriage made in heaven for the young Bourdain, who saw both chefs and musicians as creative equals, working in similar undulating patterns, touching the city’s darkest reaches every night and both, it would seem, with an unstoppable thirst for chaos.
This love affair with punk had always been at the forefront of Bourdain’s entertainment work. Whether inviting guests like Iggy Pop to his shows to share his knowledge or plugging his seminal programme Parts Unknown, full of raging rock anthems, Bourdain kept the beat and the rhythm going throughout his storied life. In truth, music was always a part of Bourdain’s life, “My dad worked at Columbia Records for a lot of the really great years of music,” he told the Archive of American Television.
Adding, “It meant I got all the Columbia and Epic records every month. I’d trade Jim Nabors records – sample copies of the records I didn’t like – for stuff on other labels.”
“Any kind of music I was into was good music as far as they were concerned,” he said, speaking of his parents’ musical roots. He also realised that having a good sense of music was important: “Music was who you were,” he added. “If you showed up at school with a Cream or a Yardbirds album under your arm, it said something.”
Punk landed on Bourdain’s shoulders in a big way. He was at the epicentre of the movement: “The music and the musicians who started playing and hanging out with each other at CBGB were an appropriate reaction to the general feelings of hopelessness, absurdity, futility, and disgust of living in New York at the time,” he wrote for Spin.
This meant that, on the various playlists that Bourdain created in his life, punk rock has always been front and centre. But on this one, things are a little bit different. That’s because, despite their Venn diagram patterns of behaviour, the kitchen was not Bourdain’s place to lose control.
Included in the list are some of the chef’s favourite artists, such as Elvis Costello and Roxy Music, but lacking are the known punk heroes of the chef like the Ramones or Dead Boys – even The Heartbreakers misses out. But there are some songs that have always resonated with the chef, picking Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Pusher Man’ he once told Rolling Stone of the unstoppable song: “Ahhh…cocaine. I wanted it. And even though the Superfly soundtrack (unlike the film) is decidedly anti-drug and cautionary, it sure made coke sound desirable to me.”
There is also a spot on the list for Brian Jonestown Massacre’s ‘Anemone’, which Bourdain said was “drenched in opiates and regret, I heard this song once and became besotted by it. It sounds like lost love, past lives, unforgiven mistakes and transgressions,” fitting acclaim for the song’s creator and Bourdain’s friend, Anton Newcombe.
The artists included in this list of perfect songs to cook to, created for his PBS show The Mind of a Chef offers a vision of Bourdain in his kitchen. Tenderising chicken to Johnny Thunders, sashaying his hips to the latest soul or some Bill Withers, or swinging around the counter to A Tribe Called Quest there’s even a spot for experimental genius Ryuichi Sakamoto, for a piece of contemplative listening.
There’s a state of flow to be found when cooking with the right playlist, and nobody was better placed than the late Bourdain to provide that. As he said in one dreamy passage about the marriage, “I mean, lets face it: when you’re eating simple barbecue under a palm tree, and you feel sand between your toes, samba music is playing softly in the backgroud, waves are lapping at the shore a few yards off, a gentle breeze is cooling the sweat on the back of your neck at the hairline, and looking across the table, past the column of empty Red Stripes at the dreamy expression on your companion’s face, you realize that in half an hour you’re proably going to be having sex on clean white hotel sheets, that grilled chicken leg suddenly tastes a hell of a lot better.”
If you have a meal planned this evening that requires a little extra time in the kitchen than usual, we can’t recommend this playlist highly enough. It will not just enliven your cooking experience, it will promote a subtle set of kitchen-based shuffling that will, undoubtedly, convince your spouse, friend or lodger to work their way toward the smells of food and get down on the kitchen dancefloor for a boogie before tucking in.
There’s truly no greater way to spend an evening.
Anthony Bourdain’s 25 favourite songs to cook to:
- ‘Across 110th Street’ – Bobby Womack
- ‘Pusher Man’ – Curtis Mayfield
- ‘Wedding Dress – Mark Lanegan
- ‘Use Me’ – Bill Withers
- ‘Tangled up in Blue’ – Bob Dylan
- ‘Both Ends Burning’ – Roxy Music
- ‘Too Many Creeps’ – Bush Tetras
- ‘You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory’ – Johnny Thunders
- ‘Time Has Come Today’ – The Chambers Brothers
- ‘Hollywood Perfume’ – Pretenders
- ‘Sweet Jane’ – The Velvet Underground
- ‘What?’ – A Tribe Called Quest
- ‘If I Had No Loot’ – Tony! Toni! Tone!
- ‘Anemone’ – The Brian Jonestown Massacre
- ‘Cold Shot’ – Stevie Ray Vaughan
- ‘Family Affair’ – Sly and The Family Stone
- ‘Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence’ – Ryuichi Sakamoto
- ‘Plundered My Soul’ – The Rolling Stones
- ‘Street Life’ – Randy Crawford
- ‘Pets’ – Porno for Pyros
- ‘Et moi, et moi, et moi’ – Jacques Dutronc
- ‘Main Titles’ – Mask
- ‘You Only Live Twice’ – John Barry
- ‘Riot Act’ – Elvis Costello and The Attractions
- ‘That’s The Way of the World’ – Earth, Wind and Fire
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